It is never too late to change the direction of your day, your summer, or your entire year. I am a firm believer in that: no matter how much time feels wasted, or how irreversibly gloomy a season may seem, something as simple as going out to meet a friend or picking up a great book can shift its energy entirely. Admittedly, this past summer was a strange season of my life. It was not gloomy by any means, but it was a season of transition to graduate school, which will begin

Slums, or informal urban constructions that have housed large segments of the urban poor, have been a contentious feature of South Asian urban politics since the colonial period. State authorities have historically viewed slums as separate, illegal constructions, and have either tolerated or actively demolished them. The legitimacy of these slums does not rest on their legality or state approval. On the contrary, the slums are legitimate because from the colonial period onwar

Another essay about cities in India...this time it's about plague, sanitation and class in colonial Bombay. Some observers of South Asian cities in the nineteenth century have concluded that South Asian cities were sharply divided into “Black Towns” and “White Towns,” reflecting the contrasting urban designs and living habits of Indian and European people (Chattopadhyay, 154.) However, the 1896 outbreak of the bubonic plague in Bombay and the urban transformations that follow

This is an essay I wrote in September, 2026. At the time, I had a wonderful professor who deepened my interest in Indian cities, and I wrote the following about the friction between European visions of urbanism and public space and South Asian conceptions of collective space. Since British colonial authorities started to reshape South Asian cities in the eighteenth century, South Asian understandings of the collective and collective space have been in tension with European co

I've been taking some time to reflect and journal about my passion for reading. Even now, after graduating college, my interest in books feels very...new and fresh. I was a late bloomer growing up, my education somewhat complicated by a severe language disorder, which I still have to this day. It’s called MERLD, and it stands for Mixed Expressive-Receptive Language Disorder. Have you heard of it? It means exactly as it sounds: a profound difficulty with both receiving and exp

If there’s any piece that encapsulates my childhood, it’s the Hummel Trumpet Concerto. I listened to Tine Thing Helseth’s beautiful recording of this concerto constantly, and it invigorated my love for classical trumpet. Very proud to share an excerpt of my recent recording!

Note: I wrote this poem while listening to the last three movements of Das Lied von der Erde: "Von der Schönheit", "Der Trinker im...

If you're like me, you love listening to podcasts with their transcripts. So, below is the transcript to the first episode of "The Sacred...

If I had to name one piece that consistently takes my breath away (without giving it back), it would be The Avatar for trumpet and piano by Steve Rouse. In eleven minutes, this music describes the evolution of our lifetimes: from descendance onto Earth, years of struggle and suffering, and finally to one’s release and ascendance to the heavens. It’s an age-old story -- one so universal that even our gods share it. Both Jesus Christ and the Hindu deity, Vishnu, divine figures

Kathleen Battle and Wynton Marsalis’s album “Baroque Duet'' captures the true essence of the word “baroque,” derived from the Portugeuse...